Art & Creativity Quote by Eduard Hanslick

Hanslick is picking a fight with the gush. In one elegant sentence he accuses an entire tradition of musical thinking of mistaking its own pulse for the point: aesthetics, he argues, got “hampered” because it treated music as a delivery system for feelings rather than an object with its own intelligible beauty. The jab is surgical. By calling the assumption “false,” he’s not merely disagreeing with Romantic-era sentimentality; he’s diagnosing a category error. Talking about how music makes you feel may be honest, even moving, but it’s also philosophically lazy because it replaces analysis with autobiography.

The context is mid-19th-century Europe, where program music and grand emotional narratives (think Liszt, Wagner, and the cult of subjective experience) were dominating both concert halls and criticism. Hanslick’s project in On the Musically Beautiful is a counterrevolution: formalism as a kind of discipline. He wants the critic to attend to musical logic - melody, harmony, rhythm, development - not to the listener’s tears as if they were evidence.

The subtext is also about authority. If beauty is measured by “feelings which music awakens,” then any reaction becomes unassailable: you can’t argue with someone’s goosebumps. Hanslick is trying to make musical judgment disputable again, to restore a shared vocabulary where critics can be wrong, not just different. That’s why the line still bites: it exposes how quickly cultural commentary slides into mood-tracking, and how much power we hand to “I felt” when we stop asking what, exactly, the work is doing.